Seed degeneration of banana planting materials: strategies for improved farmer access to healthy seed

A New Concept for Seed Precision Planting

Mechanically driven seed metering devices currently perform their function efficiently and are a good solution to the problem of metering rates as seed is planted, but there are many voids that could be filled with a substantial change to the metering process. Electronically controlled seed singulation devices can address many of the inefficiencies experienced in a mechanically driven seed mete...

Does Access to Storage Protectant Increase Smallholder Adoption of Improved Maize Seed? Insights from Malawi

SEED Servers: High-Performance Access to the SEED Genomes, Annotations, and Metabolic Models

The remarkable advance in sequencing technology and the rising interest in medical and environmental microbiology, biotechnology, and synthetic biology resulted in a deluge of published microbial genomes. Yet, genome annotation, comparison, and modeling remain a major bottleneck to the translation of sequence information into biological knowledge, hence computational analysis tools are continuo...

Securing Access to Seed: Social Relations and Sorghum Seed Exchange in Eastern Ethiopia

Access to seed is crucial for farming, though few studies investigate household-level access in the informal ‘farmer seed systems’ which still supply most seed in poor countries. This paper uses empirical data of seed exchange practices for sorghum in eastern Ethiopia to analyze how social relationships influence access to off-farm seed for a major crop. Seed shortfalls are common, and farmer–f...

Model-based exploration of strategies for fostering adoption of improved seed in West Africa

Seed of improved varieties and other inputs are imperative to the transformation of the agricultural sector from subsistence farming to small-scale commercial agriculture in developing countries. This paper analyzes the adoption and diffusion process of improved seed by farmers in West Africa. The literature about farmers’ adoption of new agricultural technology is abundant, yet it gives no int...